Certain high giga-Hertz communications techniques, such as 60 GHz millimeter wave communications, have received significant recent attention and are considered as promising technologies for short-range broadband wireless transmission with data rates up to multi-giga bits/sec. Wireless communications at such frequencies can possess several advantages including a huge clean unlicensed bandwidth (up to 7 GHz), a compact size of transceiver due to the short wavelength, and less interference brought by high atmospheric absorption. Standardization activities have been ongoing for 60 GHz Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPAN) (i.e., IEEE 802.15) and Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) (i.e., IEEE 802.11). The key physical-layer characteristics of this system include a large-scale MIMO system (e.g., 32×32) and the use of both transmit and receive beamforming techniques.
To reduce hardware complexity, typically the number of radio-frequency (RF) chains (which can include amplifiers, AD/DA converters, mixers, etc.) employed is smaller than the number of antenna elements, and an antenna selection technique is used to fully exploit the beamforming gain afforded by the large-scale MIMO antennas. Although various schemes for antenna selection exist in the literature, they all assume that the MIMO channel matrix is known or can be estimated. In some such systems, however, the receiver may have no access to such a channel matrix, for example, because the received signals may be combined in the analog domain prior to digital baseband due to an analog beamformer or phase shifter. Instead, in such cases, the receiver may only have access to the scalar output of the receive beamformer. Hence, it has been a challenging problem to devise an antenna selection method based on such a scalar only rather than the channel matrix.
Accordingly, new systems, methods, and media for selecting antennas and beamformers are desirable.